Third Day - Cry Out to Jesus (Wherever You Are) Lyrics
Lyrics
To everyone who's lost someone they love
Long before it was their time
You feel like the days you had were not enough
when you said goodbye
And to all of the people with burdens and pains
Keeping you back from your life
You believe that there's nothing and there is no one
Who can make it right
There is hope for the helpless
Rest for the weary
Love for the broken heart
There is grace and forgiveness
Mercy and healing
He'll meet you wherever you are
Cry out to Jesus, Cry out to Jesus
For the marriage that's struggling just to hang on
They lost all of their faith in love
They've done all they can to make it right again
Still it's not enough
For the ones who can't break the addictions and chains
You try to give up but you come back again
Just remember that you're not alone in your shame
And your suffering
When your lonely
And it feels like the whole world is falling on you
You just reach out, you just cry out to Jesus
Cry to Jesus
To the widow who struggles with being alone
Wiping the tears from her eyes
For the children around the world without a home
Say a prayer tonight
Video
Cry Out To Jesus
Meaning & Inspiration
I’ve spent a long time sitting in these wooden pews, watching the paint peel on the walls and watching the faces in the congregation change. My knuckles are knotted now, and my eyesight isn't what it was when I first started tracking the notes in the hymnal. When I put on Third Day’s Cry Out To Jesus, I don’t hear a radio track. I hear the quiet, desperate rooms I’ve visited in the middle of the night, where the air is thick with the smell of stale coffee and grief.
There’s a line here that catches in my throat every time: "You try to give up but you come back again."
It’s a brutal, honest assessment of what it means to be human. When I was younger, I thought faith was a straight line—a ladder you climbed rung by steady rung. But after forty years of walking through the fire, I’ve learned that life is more like a tide. We pull away, we drift, we exhaust our own meager strength trying to break the chains of our own making, and we fail. We always fail. The song acknowledges that cyclical shame—the exhaustion of trying to be "good" enough to deserve relief. It mirrors the cry of the Apostle Paul in Romans 7, that strange, agonizing tension of wanting what is right but finding ourselves bound to the very things we hate.
We want a quick fix. We want the sermon that solves the marriage, or the prayer that makes the addiction vanish overnight. But Third Day isn't offering a neat checklist here. They’re offering a wrecking ball to our self-reliance.
When they sing, "He'll meet you wherever you are," I think of the times I sat in my kitchen, house dark, staring at the floorboards, feeling like my prayers were hitting the ceiling and falling back like dead leaves. Is it enough? To just "cry out"? It feels too simple, doesn't it? Like telling a man drowning in the ocean that all he has to do is call for help. And yet, when the lights finally go out and you realize you have nothing left to trade—no good deeds, no impressive resume of morality—that cry is the only thing you have left.
Psalm 34:18 tells us that the Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and he saves those who are crushed in spirit. That isn’t a promise for the people who have it all figured out. It’s for the ones who have run out of steam, who are sitting in the wreckage of a marriage or the hollow ache of a loss that refuses to mend.
I’m still not sure if crying out is the end of the struggle or just the beginning of the surrender. Maybe it’s both. My hands are too tired to do much else these days, so maybe that’s the point—that the crying itself is the work, the act of turning your head toward the only One who isn't standing on the shore, but is right there in the water with you.